Show HN: I made a web-based, free alternative to Screen Studio

Hi HN,

I've built a 100% web-based screen recording tool aimed at product marketing managers, developers, or anyone wanting to showcase their work along with a talking head. Inspired by ScreenStudio, it allows you to effortlessly create polished recordings directly from your browser.

A couple of technical highlights I'm particularly proud of:

Initially, I used ReMotion but ran into limitations. I ended up building my own animation engine from scratch, closely inspired by ReMotion's capabilities but tailored specifically for my use-case.

Due to browser security constraints with getDisplayMedia(), I couldn't directly track cursor movements. To overcome this, I trained a custom YOLO (You-Only-Look-Once) model for cursor detection. This allowed me to implement smooth, mouse-following animations within recordings, bypassing the browser limitations entirely.

Happy to dive deeper into the tech if anyone's interested!

Thank you!

Currently, videos are recorded and uploaded directly to Amazon S3, and I haven't set an explicit limit on video length. I've personally tested uploads around 15–20 minutes without issues, and a couple of users have successfully recorded 30-minute videos, though I haven't fully rendered or extensively tested videos at that length yet.

The app uses a custom renderer inspired by ReMotion, so while the app can output MP4s, I also have a player that is dynamic HTML/CSS animation powered by JS, hosted either on my site. I could make it a player that is hosted from anywhere, and I think I will do this for a free tier.

Theoretically, this setup can handle videos of arbitrary length, but practically speaking, I've only thoroughly tested around 10–15 minutes. I'd recommend caution with significantly longer recordings (like an hour) for now, as you might encounter rendering issues.

Looks interesting mate. screenstudio keeps crashing for me endlessly ... so this is a welcome effort

Seems cool! But for privacy reasons I prefer to do the recording locally and send the file myself. I've been using the extension https://cursorful.com/ (only for Chrome), which doesn't upload the video to the cloud, it just does everything locally, and the free tier features are enough for me.